[JesseK]

Derrick, if that's the way the engineering notebooks wins in FTC, then the engineering notebook isn't what the award should be named. Engineering Notebooks, in general, are about how to build a product and not how to run a company.

It's perfectly normal to speak about cost relative to a budget in terms of why certain design decisions were made, but the reality is that cost is always relative to the immediate whims of the market; the engineering notebook is meant to persist well past that. To add too much information about cost to an engineering notebook is to blur the design behind the product that was developed -- something that may create confusion when a third party looks at the notebook.

Just keep this in mind when moving on to college. A professor doesn't care about the details of how you funded your genius idea nearly as much as he/she cares about how it works and why you made various decisions. If they do care, then perhaps they're teaching the wrong subject. If you do this in your career, then a business case can be built around your product as it applies to the current market and not the market you [shouldn't be speaking of] spoke of in the book.